Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

aquabat writes "According to Shanghai Daily, a boy from the Anhui Province desperately wanted to buy Apple's flagship tablet but didn't have enough cash. Rather than waiting to save up the money for the Apple product when it invariably gets marked down, the lad decided to sell one of his kidneys for 22,000 yuan (roughly $3,400) so he could afford one. But, surprisingly, the scenario in which the organ was harvested wasn't in the best of conditions, and the boy isn't feeling very well."

Did you read the part about where it was a kid? Kids do stupid things - all kids - unless they are raised in a glass bubble. So yeah, try to have some compassion for children who do things that seem stupid to adults. Geez.

It's pretty hard to have compassion for something so obviously stupid. If he'd sold it to help his sick mother or something that would be grounds for compassion, but he significantly shortened his lifespan to buy a tech toy which will be passe in a year's time, if not sooner.. wtf..

It certainly does someone some good. Seriously, you are neglecting the fact that there is someone out there who needs a kidney, and probably will die without one. How can you be so sure that this is harmful for society? If there aren't enough people willing to donate a kidney for no compensation, then you can increase the pool of donors by offering some compensation. That's capitalism, isn't it?

You exhibit the emotional maturity of a twelve year old boy. It is plainly obvious you have no concept of empathy. In due course you will come to understand where kindness lies (hint: it's not within the bounds of reason), but only after great suffering. Good luck.

Yeah, and what's with those damn pedestrians too?!! I mean, those legs are death traps, they don't absorb the impact of a car at all. Compounded with the fact that pedestrians don't even wear safety equipment half the time, it's like they're asking to be hit by cars, trucks and buses.

Spoken like a true American, living your life from safety-tested cradle to carefully scrubbed and disinfected coffin, and in between using gallons of hand sanitizer and standing in line with your shoes off at the airport.

Isn't it shameful living your life in fear? Must personal safety be the most important consideration at all times? Don't you ever get bored?

Spoken like a true American, living your life from safety-tested cradle to carefully scrubbed and disinfected coffin, and in between using gallons of hand sanitizer and standing in line with your shoes off at the airport.

Actually the US driving test has reached the point that its stupid-easy. When I hear about people taking several attempts to pass it (at $20 each, one per day with no limit) I get a little concerned. In exchange, we have stupid road rules and enforcement because they have to be set up on the assumption that every driver is a no-talent assclown.

Contrast this to the UK drivers' test which, at least back in the 80s when I left, was long, extensive, had a limited number of attempts per year, and on which you

I wasn't disputing that the driving tests are stupidly easy -- that's a given. GP thinks that only a fool would ride a motorcycle, and that they are to blame for any accident they may be involved in.

I find that retarded because it can be (and is!) taken to dumb extremes:*Anyone who drives over 50 mph DESERVES to have an accident!*Anyone who drives a compact car DESERVES to get crushed by one of these SUVs!*Anyone who rides a bicycle or walks DESERVES to get hit!*Anyone who doesn't think and act JUST LIKE M

Exactly, like all those people who leave their mother's basements. It's totally their own fault when they get mugged/kidnapped/hit by a bus/eaten by a velociraptor. Anyone who takes anything but the safest possible path in life deserves to die.

In other news, why does/. insist that I have every single comment above the one to which I'm replying open before it'll let me actually type anything?

To be realistic most of us simply do not have an infinite amount of compassion. While yes, ultimately this is a story about a man selling his organs for things he cannot afford... It was an iPad.
Not food, clothing, shelter or even a chance to improve his lot in life just the days hottest piece of tech.

Looking at your posting history, you have some fairly deep-seated issues and it's fairly obvious that you're using Slashdot as an outlet. Get outside and breathe the fresh air more - perhaps move out of the city if you're stuck in one.

It's fortunate that people are more compassionate than you, otherwise you'd probably be out on the street by now. The only stupidity here is your religious understanding of the human brain as having the potential to be a perfectly rational machine rather than just another biol

Did it ever occur to anyone that he might be mentally ill and/or developmentally disabled? Jesus, he'd almost have to be. Last I checked, a proper and just society protected people from this sort of thing.

All surgery has risk. But I agree that this action was highly unethical and harmful to the patient, whose mental health issues (valuing an iPod over a kidney is not an expected attitude) should have been addressed first. Not to mention that according to TFA the hospital is not qualified to perform transplants, so the organ was probably "wasted".

Anyone who's ever witnessed an Apple fanboi wouldn't be that shocked. I certainly wasn't. Dismayed, yes.. shocked, no.. this was monumentally stupid. He should have just got a cheap Chinese tablet, or used iPad, even if he was desperate for a gadget fix.

This is not an Apple fanboi - how could he be, he can't even afford an iPad - you think he has an iMac or MacBook pro kicking around?This is a guy who has fallen victim to the wonderful world of crass materialism. He doesn't care that it's made by apple, he cares that everyone else has one of these things, and he had better get one too.

Actually, not so much - there's a pretty well agreed upon bias towards putting the collective good ahead of individual good in Eastern countries and the reverse, a bias promoting individual good over collective good in many Western cultures. So much so that criteria for many mental illnesses can be radically different based on cultural factors.

To rephrase your statement to take this into account - "valuing an iPad/money AND the ability to help someone else who needs it with an organ" - muddies the waters a

People do pay 'big' cash for kidneys, I believe that there was even talk of legalizing the trade in places. It's not hard to see why some people would be willing to sell their own 'extra' organs for what they might see as a princely sum. Many people die from just such circumstances every year, it's a sad reality. The fact that one of the things he bought was an iPad2 is only a detail showing that his 'needs' were purely superficial and enough to get picked up as a story by Slashdot.

There are no "extra" organs. A kidney donor's physiological reserve is diminished after donation. Sure, the donor can live to a ripe old age with just one kidney - provided nothing ever goes wrong. However their ability to deal with extreme cases like infection, toxicity and pH/electrolyte imbalances is compromised and they tend to die a lot faster in these situations than a person with two functional kidneys.

This is one of those things that seems "obviously" true, but the data does NOT bear it out. Living kidney donors do not suffer from diminished quality of life or life expectancy. There is a modest increase in blood pressure with increased risk of hypertension but minimal decline in eGFR (ie the remaining kidney picks up most of the slack). Cohorts with good follow-up have followed subjects as far out as 28 years post donation without significantly increased mortality.

The set of ICU-level conditions that would rapidly kill a living kidney donor but not lead to long-term morbidity/mortality for a non-donor are so small as to be negligible.

The people who do worst as donors are the obese, but I am not aware of any research comparing obese living kidney donors to obese non-donors, so it isn't clear to me at all that their lesser outcomes (worse progression of hypertension with proteinuria) represent an interaction between obesity and loss of renal function rather than just the pernicious effects of obesity.

I dunno - at some level money is life. People with money inevitably do better health-wise. What if you spent the money from the kidney on buying healthier food, or paying health insurance premiums, or putting it in your "insurance won't pay for it" savings account?

I doubt I'd ever sell a kidney just for the cash (if it were ever legalized so many people would do it that you wouldn't get much money for it anyway). However, the health vs money tradeoff isn't quite as clear is one might think.

she gives you the capacity to live, without any more or less than what you need

if our distant ancestors were all carrying around some massively overengineered amount of blood filtration capacity, the mutants amongst them with a much smaller capacity would do better reproductively with lower biological overhead in terms of needs. and therefore that much smaller amount of capacity would become the new normal. mutants with below capacity would suffer premature death and lower vigor and vitality and suffer repr

a tonsil and an appendix cost the body a pittance to run. their existence is also explained in terms of them slowly atrophying away, like our toes used to be fingers. in other words, your examples support my argument

now you tell me what it costs the body for an "extra" kidney in terms of maintenance, and therefore, why do we have it?

According to TFA, the hospital where his kidney was removed was in fact a military one: "PLA 198 hospital", which, when questioned by the police, claimed no knowledge on the broker who arranged the deal, since the whole department was "contracted to a businessman".

Wow, if he gave Steve Jobs his pancreas his family could've gotten some shares of Apple, an iPad 2 and more Mac shit than he could shake a chopstick at. It'd save Steve the embarassment of buying his way ahead in line for another transplant.

You have to understand that $3400 in China is a lot closer to a year's salary than you might think. In the US $100K is a decent salary for a year, but not too long ago a Chinese company that was building an aftermarket navigation system for cars said they were paying top software engineers $3500 a year. Now a few years have gone by and things change in China pretty quickly these days but still $3400 is probably more money in one pile than most people ever dream of having.

This is just a sign of the time - Chinese are the ones producing the damned things, and they are the ones having to sell their kidneys to own one. I am really wondering how much more will it take their people, before they rise against their government and stop their government from printing their own currency into oblivion, just so the foreigners can enjoy fruits of Chinese labor so cheaply, while the Chinese standard of living is stagnating, because their own money does not buy the products, they themselv

You are very right about this. But consider that the Chinese government has been telling its citizens to acquire gold for several years now, and they've done as they were told. It's in preparation, I believe, for decoupling the yuan from the dollar. I am shocked few people are aware of this, because when that happens, the pent-up domestic demand in China will have a chance to be met, and a large middle class will emerge there in a few year (much like the USA after WWII). In the US, the dollar will becom

Put it another way, but yes, sort of. There aren't going to be enough jobs for two people to find worthwhile work. It will make economic sense to have someone stay home and do the domestic work, and maybe have a part-time crappy job. And there will be one car. And maybe one TV, and maybe not such great cell phones and blu-ray players, and when things break they won't get replaced, they'll get fixed. There's a lot more to why many families of four have two incomes than just living expenses. We've becom

Sorry, but I would have to give a kidney to own one too, I am obiously not going to but that doesnt change the situation. So I ask why should I care about the chineese having real money when working class slobs like I are in the same perdictiment

But my question was not directed at you, reread my comment. My question was a rhetorical one, directed at the people of China - What gives, people of China? Why do you want to give up you kidneys to own stupid iPads, when you are the ones manufacturing them? All you have to do is send a real message to your government (or better yet, take it down), so that the Chinese currency is no longer manufactured and US/EU inflation is no longer pushed into Asia.

Businesses aren't manufacturing anything in the US partly because of regulation but also because it makes no sense to do so any longer. The cost of manufacturing stuff in China is so low that it makes more sense to make it there and ship it - even at outrageous shipping costs - than it does to make it in the US.

I recently had some stuff made in China and shipped here. The shipping cost was 25% of the cost of the finished products, but the total cost was about 50% of the cost of doing the same thing in the

Nobody is going to start a nuclear war over treasury bills. While the people that run China might end up living in slightly less opulence after a trade war, they're far better off than they would be living in a parking lot. Those guys have something to lose.

China doesn't really have the ability to strike at the US conventionally, and the US doesn't need to bomb the Chinese (they're already ahead if they cancel the debt). I'm sure there might be some skirmishes in far-away lands, and a bunch of people wil

The only real problem from the US standpoint is that we've gotten used to this arrangement.

- no, that's not the real problem.

The real problem is that there is no capital investment in USA, it moved to China and other places, and this means that for USA to be able to restart manufacturing, it either will have to rebuild all the tools it will need by hand, if the trade is fully blocked, or it will have to sell a lot of energy and other mined resources to Chinese and others, in order to get the tools, machines, finished products necessary to restart manufacturing and production.

True, but a trade war will start slowly over time too. If the Chinese float their currency their prices will steadily rise, making it less cost-effective to outsource there. Either work will shift to some other country, or back to the US. I doubt the Chinese will just wake up one day and declare a blockade or something, and the US isn't about to just do something like default on its debt without some kind of warning.

- why would it go back to the place, where the market conditions are nearly the worst in the world for investment capital and business regulations and labor market, it's really not going to return. It will have to be rebuilt domestically, with new businesses, willing to start from scratch basically, which is going to be insanely difficult, as the interest rates for US based businesses to get real investment and to be able to buy real machines and tools and talent will be very high, I expect high double dig

1. Inflation by government printing.2. Income/corporate/payroll taxes, as well as the mess of medical taxes.3. Business regulations.

The cost of labor is really on a distant fourth if it even enters the real equation, the real problem is always the government, and if government is not involved, the cost of labor will adjust to the market conditions, so it's really not that important.

Well, if you are going to compare it that way, then compare the actual USE of the product - government inflation means that the loss of the purchasing power will not allow the Boeing employees to book flights on those planes, never mind buying them outright.

Our world is full of surprises, it's good to know that there are good and honest black market organs dealer out there that would not take advantage of someone in need for cash. I can sleep easy at night knowing that if i need cash i can always turn to a black market organs dealer and trust that he/she/they would only removed what I'm willing to sell rather than murder me and sell all of my organs.

While life is valuable here in western countries (consider what Americans spend in the final year of their lives for a few more months of breathing), elsewhere, and depending upon where you are, life can be bought for as little as a few hundred.

you sense potential? i sense evil. i have to wonder at what kind of asshole you are

of course desperate people do desperate things. you think that's some sort of revelation? it's typical, no matter how much money is floating around in society. in the rich fat decadent west, are guys who lose it all on gambling, or can't laid with a child as they want to, or whatever, and a black market for certain desperate people in desperate situations exists. everywhere. not just nigeria

I'm really hoping this is a viciously satirical post, but I'm falling victim to Poe's Law.

If you're aping Jonathan Swift, congratulations, you got me.

If you're not, and you're actually as old as your user id would seem to indicate, then might I suggest that in your Last Will and Testament you request that they put an all-steel fireproof shovel into your coffin with you before they put you in the ground?

It'll make things easier when you get to Hell and they tell you to start digging.

In this case, I see the village as the whole world which is dominated by advertising/marketing messages.

Many of us feel immune or dulled to the messages of advertisers. But children are especially vulnerable to it. This is why so much is being marketed to younger people rather than to older people -- younger people are more receptive to advertising. (Among older people, the question of necessity is more often asked as is the question of

If the parents are incompentent to raise a child, I guess it takes a village to step in and take over. Otherwise, the Hillaryism is just silly - you end up with a child with the values of a mob (the village) rather than the values of a person. Mobs are good for some things, but ethics and morality get left behind.

But really, this kid got what he deserves. This kind of stuff goes on in China all the damn time. On the upside, the kid didn't have his organs harvested when he was in a labor camp. He at least got paid a bit of money, and has something to show for it. The only reason this made any kind of Western headlines is because he wanted an Apple widget. If organ harvesting was feasable back when America was up & coming, you can bet the same crap would have gone on. Instead? We just snatched people of different

Before anyone starts spouting off about how we shouldn't apply "Western" values to Asia, I'd like to point out that whoever wielded the knife here was in screaming violation of Chinese medical ethical standards:

"A Great Physician should not pay attention to status, wealth or age; neither should he question whether the particular person is attractive or unattractive, whether he is an enemy or friend, whether he is a Chinese or a foreigner, or finally, whether he